"Couples as Partners and Parents over Children's Early Years"

We used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine how couple relationship quality and parental engagement are linked over children's early years-when they are infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Our sample included 1,630 couples that were coresident over years 1 to 3 and 1,376 couples that were coresident over years 3 to 5 (1,196 over both periods). Overall, we found that better relationship quality predicted greater parental engagement for both mothers and fathers-especially in the infant to toddler years; in contrast, we found little evidence that parental engagement predicted future relationship quality. Married and cohabiting couples were generally similar in how relationship quality and parenting were linked.     

The Unity Council at 40: a pioneering community development and service organization (1967-2007)

The Spanish Speaking Unity Council (Unity Council) is a community development nonprofit organization that was established in 1964, during the civil rights movement, by a group of community members who wanted to ensure the political representation of the Latino community. Over its 45-year history, the Unity Council has grown into a $12 million community development organization that delivers a range of programming, including social services and employment training as well as facilitating the development and support of local businesses, low-income housing, and neighborhood improvement activities. The history of the agency presents the multiple challenges and rewards associated with development in an underserved community and an example of the important role that leadership plays in the growth of a nonprofit.     

BANANAS: providing child care services to a multi-ethnic community

BANANAS, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that has provided child care resource and referral services for over 35 years. BANANAS emerged as a grassroots effort initiated by a group of female volunteers who sought to build a network of women with children who needed childcare. As the organization developed, its leaders recognized and responded to additional needs, including resource and information sharing, workshops and classes, and political advocacy. Beginning as a collective, BANANAS has grown into a multifaceted service delivery and advocacy nonprofit operating with an annual budget of $12 million. This history of the agency reflects the development of a unique community-based effort, its challenges and rewards, and the multiple successes that this pioneering nonprofit has experienced.     

Jewish Family and Children's Services: a pioneering human service organization (1850-2008)

Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin, and Sonoma Counties is a pioneering nonprofit human service organization that has delivered services for 157 years. Over the course of its history, the organization has transformed itself from an all-volunteer agency delivering aid to immigrant families during the Gold Rush era to a $30 million nonprofit human service organization offering a full-range of services to adults, children, and families. The history of Jewish Family and Children's Services sheds light on the importance of strong leadership, strategic planning, external relationships, and strong donor support.     

CompassPoint Nonprofit Services: strengthening the capacities of nonprofits (1971-2008)

CompassPoint Nonprofit Services is a nonprofit organization that delivers cutting-edge research and support services to the nonprofit community. Over its 30-year history, CompassPoint has transitioned from a small management support agency into a nationally-recognized leader in nonprofit capacity building and nonprofit management research. Through its strong internal operations and external connections, the agency has been able to stay current on the multiple challenges facing the local and national nonprofit community. CompassPoint has been a valuable resource for the nonprofit sector as it has struggled to retain its identity over the past 30 years, in relation to political and economic changes that have altered the functioning of the sector as a whole.     

Larkin Street Youth Services: helping kids get off the street for good (1982-2007)

Larkin Street Youth Services is a pioneering nonprofit organization that was established in 1981 to serve the growing urban homeless and runaway youth population. What began as a neighborhood effort has evolved into a $12 million organization over the course of its 25-year history. Larkin Street Youth Services delivers a continuum of services to homeless youth including counseling, housing, education, employment, and HIV services. The agency has received significant local and national attention for the success of its targeted program model and continuum of care services. The history of Larkin Street Youth Services provides an example of the important role of internal operations in an agency's ability to re-invent itself and respond to a larger community need.     

Gender as contradiction: From dichotomies to diversity in natural resource extraction

Given the varied nature of resource dependent communities, the gendered experiences of women and men may vary in unexpected and contradictory ways. Building on a review and critique of existing theoretical approaches and studies of US and Canadian extractive resource communities in both the feminist and rural social science literature, we provide an analytical approach to engage with gender in the context of these dramatic changes. Our framework, which integrates key insights from recent feminist theorizing, summarizes emergent constructions of masculinity and femininity in a given context by emphasizing the possible contradictions along three broad lines: material, material-discursive, and discursive.     

Managing Maturing Government‐Supported Networks: The Shift from Monitoring to Embeddedness Controls

In formal inter‐firm networks backed with significant financial support by policy‐makers, network boards are typically established to monitor network activities and to manage the tension between organizational and collective interests. This approach to network governance, however, builds mainly upon agency logic. We integrate agency with embeddedness theory to offer insights into the effectiveness of monitoring as a governance mechanism as networks mature and member firms become embedded. The analyses focus on two issues: (1) how network board characteristics typically associated with monitoring – board independence, board size and board compensation – influence network performance; and (2) how these effects are moderated by network age. The model is tested with longitudinal data on 53 government‐supported networks. In addition to the direct effects of board characteristics, network board size and board compensation have a stronger positive impact on network performance in younger networks than in more mature networks. This study provides insight into why the instituting of boards may prove successful for network‐level performance in newly formed government‐supported networks, but also explains why the positive effects from network board monitoring may diminish as networks grow older.     

Waste identification diagrams

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a very popular tool in lean environments to represent production flows, mapping value stream of a product or family of products, and helps to identify some types of waste. Although very popular, this tool has some limitations as already described in many publications, especially in terms of restrictions in showing most types of waste as well as in its inability to represent various production routes. The purpose of this study is to introduce the waste identification diagram (WID), a new tool to represent production units with its different forms of waste, which overcomes some VSM limitations. The originality of WID comes from the use of its symbols’ dimensions to convey, in a visual and immediate way, relevant information about a production unit. In this paper, WID is applied on a production unit of a lift manufacturer, for testing its performance and comparing it to VSM. The main findings are that WID is in general more effective than VSM in terms of representation of complex production units and in terms of identification of more forms of waste. WID must however overcome some of its limitations such as the lack of information-flow representation and the links to suppliers and clients.